Deliver desktop-dependent application with Silverlight

Question

Task:

I have a Windows executable, for example, convertvideo.exe. It is a command line tool for specific video conversion.

I want my clients to be able to easily use it on any machine, without installation. The use-case should be: client goes to a web page, that hosts a silverlight application. Application tells the client to press "put the executable in a temp folder" button. When pressed, the executable is deployed (downloaded, copied) on a client machine. Then silverlight app asks the user to provide the list of files to convert, as well as the path for the result files. The user presses convert, and the silverlight app runs (on a client machine) the convertvideo.exe with the provided parameters to do a conversion.

Question:

Is this possible with the file system access privileges, the Silverlight app has from within the browser?

Answer 1

If you want an in-browser Silverlight app, this is not possible in Silverlight 4. It will be possible in-browser with Silverlight 5, but that has not been released yet.

This can, however, be accomplished with an out-of-browser application in Silverlight 4. See "Building an Out-ofBrowser Application" for tips on how to deliver your out-of-browser app to your users via the browser. The "install" process is just a UAC dialog, pretty minimal.

When running out of browser, you can bundle your .exe as a resource and save it to a known location on disk (caution, though -- SL4 doesn't have full access to the disk, only to certain areas like "My Documents" or isolated storage). To run the .exe, you can use COM:

using (dynamic shell = AutomationFactory.CreateObject("WScript.Shell"))
{
    shell.Run(@"Path\To\Exe\convertvideo.exe arg1 arg2 etc...");
}